Haiti can’t be fixed by foreign troops

Bad ideas never die. They just wait for the next crisis to offer themselves up again.

Using the military to fix nonmilitary problems is perhaps the most tragic and costly bad idea, yet proposals by the State Department and the media for U.S. allies to do exactly that in Haiti are bubbling up anew.

The perennially dysfunctional Caribbean nation just 650 miles from Miami is battling an unprecedented wave of gang violence. The United Nations estimated this spring that gangs controlled as much as 80 percent of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The resulting humanitarian crisis affects the U.S. and every other country in the region as desperate Haitians flee in all directions.

Read article in National Review